Simone Weil: teaching and taylorisation

“Will we allow our students’ faces to be torn away, turning them into a faceless mass for anonymous production at the speed demanded by algorithms?” . / Photo: Gisela Merkuur – Pixabay

License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

In 1932, Simone Weil wrote an article entitled Capital and the Worker, in which she observed: “Work is all the more productive the more it is divided. Thus, the division of labour was gradually carried to its extreme limit, at which each worker has only one gesture to perform. From that moment, the worker’s gesture could be replaced by a mechanical movement. And it was then that machinery developed”. This text, now included in the recent anthology Sobre el trabajo (On Work, Página Indómita), reveils Weil as a resolutely revolutionary intellectual. The originality of her thought lay in identifying Taylorism and rationalised bureaucracy as the true enemies of a genuinely socialist society. Applied to the realm of education, her insights are profoundly revealing.

Take, for instance, the notion of “machinism” (the mechanization of man). Even today, despite all the evidence around us, some still regard the uncritical introduction of technology into the classroom as a path to redemption and emancipation. The official line is well known: teachers must step aside and become mere facilitators, for it is AI and algorithms that are now entrusted with educating the young. The consequences are twofold: the reduction of teachers to a series of mechanical “gestures” (filling in endless forms, ticking boxes on apps, drafting ceaseless self-justifications), and the complete hollowing out of the profession—stripped of its human essence—into pure “machinism.”

With Marx as her guide, Weil understood that when workers lost mastery over the machine and were instead mastered by it in the Taylorised factory, they were deprived of their humanity. And that, precisely, is what has now happened in our classrooms. What began as a legitimate pedagogical use of technology has degenerated into an abject submission to apps, automatisms, and bureaucratic demands.

Five years later, in Rationalisation (1937), Weil developed these ideas further, allowing us to recognise in today’s digitalisation (or, as I prefer to call it, siliconisation, since we are dealing with an ideology of social domination rather than neutral tools) a new form of educational Taylorism: “The term industrial revolution is generally used to refer to the transformation that took place in industry when science was first applied to production and large-scale industry appeared. But we could speak of a second industrial revolution. The first was defined by the scientific use of inert matter and the forces of nature; the second, by the scientific use of living matter—that is, of human beings”. Can there be any doubt that the Silicon Revolution has already transformed—and will continue to transform—the world of education? This is no longer the old machinist utopia that placed robots at the centre of public instruction (surely the cheapest option), but something far more sinister: the reduction of teachers themselves to robots, utterly obedient. Teachers have become the implementers of production targets fixed by a Five-Year Plan—namely, the 2030 Agenda—without anyone caring much for actual educational outcomes, or even for that external agenda itself.

The internal agenda of a public education system—the pursuit of literacy, intellectual autonomy, theoretical thought and the enjoyment of high culture—is no longer desirable. These are obstacles to the new techno-feudalism. Yet many teachers persist in a kind of passive resistance. Like all utopias, this one has produced only a half-formed dystopia: too many teachers still refuse to falsify production goals or to act as transmission belts for the digital standard. Too many remain obstinately committed to doing their job. And the administration no longer knows how to break them, how to stop them from teaching. It has tried everything to bend them to its will: investing millions in re-education courses, promoting the seductive gurus of the so-called Competency Gospel, organising symposia, TED talks and endless theatrical events, subjecting teachers to countless bureaucratic disciplinary mechanisms, repeatedly forcing them to retract, issue self-criticisms, and humiliating them each morning in the mainstream media. It has tried seduction, bribery, threats and insults—but there are still constitutional labour protections, and still too many ethical instincts. It can’t be helped. For now, the ethical commitment to the emancipatory power of education has prevailed over the armies of fanatical, menacing apparatchiks.

The teaching revolts of the immediate future will therefore not be against educational machinery, but against bureaucratisation. Teachers are not Luddites—they are professionals of ethics. The enemy, as Weil already saw, is the same: a dehumanised bureaucracy demanding spasmodic obedience.

The siliconisation of our classrooms has brought about what Simone Weil called the “uprootedness”. In a 1943 essay she reflected on this devastating form of uprooting: “There is a third obstacle to workers’ culture: slavery. Thought, when truly exercised, is essentially free and sovereign. To be free and sovereign as a thinking being for one or two hours a day, and a slave for the rest of it, is such a rending contradiction that one can hardly avoid abandoning the higher forms of thought” (quote translated from the Spanish edition of Sobre el trabajo, Página Indómita, translation by Luis González Castro).

Competence-based reform demands that teachers cease to think—so that pupils can cease to think as well. It uproots the entire educational community and imposes upon it a preordained future. To explore the past in order to reopen multiple or unforeseen futures is something it cannot tolerate. Hence the growing demoralisation and disorientation of both teachers and students, who can no longer communicate or move forward freely. They spend six hours a day enmeshed in a sophisticated system of social alienation, sanctioned by authoritarian and incomprehensible decrees that nobody wanted. Heresy is suppressed through a new bureaucratic war, a heavy artillery of grotesque, abstract edifices. Any dissenting voice, any doubt, provokes intense irritation in school management teams. The chain of command—like the assembly line—must never stop or be questioned. We cannot pause to think; the consequences would be catastrophic. We would have to start again almost from scratch, and the framework of Dogma would collapse under the unbearable weight of its own deceit, resentment, posthumanism and mediocrity.

The Automaton will provide the content—and the life guidance. The teacher, as Santiago García Tirado has noted, is now seen as the enemy of the new system, and the administration as the secular arm of this bureaucratic absolutism. The Western teacher has been Taylorised: hence their powerlessness, anxiety, and retreat into antidepressants and depression’s labyrinths. Teachers still wish to think—and wish their students to think freely.

Will bureaucratised education prevail, with its fixed learning outcomes, targets, methods, and timed “competences”, predefining the lives of future slaves in rationalised public centres? Will we allow our students’ faces to be stripped away, turning them into anonymous production masses driven by algorithmic speed? Or will we choose instead to educate within a rehumanised framework of trust—beyond the diktats of the new siliconised bureaucracies?

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons